This section provides general background information related to the present disclosure and is not necessarily prior art.
Countless people suffer from chronic, intermittent, or injury related pain. Often the body responds to pain by tightening the muscles which can decrease the circulation in the affected area and cause the patient continuing painful symptoms.
It is noted that pain is a warning system and is the human body's primary method of telling a person that something is wrong. Pain is important because without it, abnormal conditions may go undetected, and that can cause significant, and sometimes permanent, damage or injury to vital body parts.
It is estimated that about 25% of the population suffers from chronic pain. Several major medical institutions have also estimated that about 8-11% of the population suffer from Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS). Additionally, it is also known that about 2-3% of the population has Sciatica and another 2-3% suffer from Fibromyalgia.
There is a long history of using electrical stimulation for relief of pain beginning with the ancient Egyptians and Greeks who knew of the electro-analgesic effects of standing in a pool with electric fish. In more recent times, low voltage pulses of electric current for pain relief became popular with the U.S. military during World War II.
Since 1960 and the advent of the microelectronic age, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation medical devices have become smaller and more portable. Over the past 60 years, such devices have become the preferred choice for non-addictive drug free control of pain for millions of people.
Traditionally, transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation makes use of flexible electrodes that are attached to the skin or the use of electrical probes having a variety of shapes and sizes. These devices all rely on a stimulating pulse current that travels between an anode through the skin into the underlying tissues and back though the skin to a cathode.
The problem with this arrangement is that the current is diffused or diluted as it expands into the various tissues of the body having different resistivities. As predicted by Ohm's law (I=V/R), electricity takes the path of least resistance. If the electrode is pressed directly over the nerve as current TENS units describe, the results are unpredictable and ambiguous because of the variable resistance of the skin, tissue and nerve. The effectiveness of the treatment of any given nerve center is dependent on the amount of current that actually reaches all the symptomatic portions of a particular nerve and this explains the erratic nature of the results when using prior art devices.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a more predictable method of treating pain that includes a specially designed treatment device that can be easily positioned and repositioned to effectively treat a nerve that is suspected of being the source of a patient's pain.